Jay Stapley website and blog

Update on my Adventures in Blockchain Music

Well, what a surprise! So far I have earned $.026 per stream, £.0177 in English money. The exact amount per stream varies slightly according to the price of Bitcoin, but Spotify and Apple’s rates are shown in the chart below: Spotify is $.004 (less than a halfpenny) and Apple is little better at $.00735.
This is not funny…Or rather, it is funny if you’re on the right side of it. Taking an average of $.005 (as more of my streams are on Spotify than Apple) I need 5.26 streams on Spotify to equal 1 stream on Musicoin, my current platform of choice.

Granted that extracting the money is a bit kludgy (I’ll make a short video on this soon) but it all works.

Most importantly: my music is under my control. I stream it at Musicoin.org and high-bandwidth wavs are for sale at Aurovine.com. Musicoin’s streaming price is set (although listeners can tip me more if they like and as shown above the basic stream rate pisses all over Spotify/Apple etc.,) and on Aurovine I set my own price for sales.
I can also put together bundles on Aurovine: for example, I can sell the stems to my tracks. Anyone want to do their own remix? Let me know: I think £50 for the raw multi-track is reasonable if it’s a full band track.

OK: The figures I’ve earned so far wouldn’t pay the average rent on a London flat, but it won’t be long before I’m making enough to pay my mobile phone bill every month, and that’s significant progress from the dire situation most independent artists have been in for the last 10 years.

Why bother? Why not just bite the bullet and put all my stuff out on Spotify/Apple?
Simple: I place a higher value on my music. I’m good at it, it takes hard work, resources and talent to create it and I’m damned if I’ll roll over and accept the corporate imperative of having the value of my music set by someone else. Even if I only sell 2 tracks on Aurovine and get another 500 streams on Musicoin (yes, I’ve had at least that many already!) I’m ahead of where I was. More importantly, I FEEL BETTER:-)